As we reported a few months back, Keir Starmer, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions, made the remarkable suggestion
that "the time has come for an informed debate about the boundaries of
free speech in an age of social media." That debate has now arrived in
the form of a UK consultation on "prosecutions involving social media
communications," which takes as its starting point a series of interim
guidelines for UK prosecutors when they are grappling with the freedom
of speech issues raised by such cases. Here's how Starmer describes the initiative:

One of the most depressing developments in recent years has been the
gradual adoption of legal approaches to tackling copyright infringement
that a few years ago would have been regarded as totally unacceptable,
and the hallmarks of a tinpot republic run by some ridiculous dictator.
Here's another example, this time from Israel, involving secret courts and inscrutable judgments, as Jonathan Klinger explains:

If ACTA was the biggest global story of
2012, more locally there's no doubt that the UK government's
consultation on open standards was the key event. As readers will
remember, this was the final stage in a long-running saga with many
twists and turns, mostly brought about by some uncricket-like behaviour
by proprietary software companies who dread a truly level playing-field
for government software procurement.

One of the striking -- and depressing -- features of the Internet
today is the almost universal desire of governments around the world to
rein it in through new laws. We wrote about one such attempt in the
Philippines a couple of months ago, where the government is trying to
bring in some particularly wide-ranging and troubling legislation.
Although the Philippine Supreme Court put a temporary restraining order on the law, the Philippine government is not softening its stance, and has asked the court to lift the order. Its arguments are pretty worrying:

Despite increasing competition around the world, China remains the
leader when it comes to finding ways to censor the online world. A few
months ago, the site Tech in Asia listed no less than eight ways in
which users of Sina Weibo, China's hugely-popular homegrown microblog
service, can be penalized for "inappropriate" tweets. Now it seems it has come up with a ninth:

Techdirt has been covering the UK's long-running saga of attempted copyright reform for some years. Most recently, we wondered
whether even the Hargreaves Review's moderate suggestions would survive
in the face of the usual frenzied lobbying from the copyright industry.
Rather remarkably, they have, and the UK government has published a
list of the legislative changes it proposes to make (pdf).

Alongside globe-spanning treaties like ACTA and TPP, there are more
subtle efforts to limit the power of national governments, through the
use of free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties
(BITs). There are now so many of these that it's hard to keep up,
although the dedicated site bilaterals.org is a great help
here. The confusing multiplicity only adds to their attractiveness for
those negotiating them behind close doors, keen as they are to avoid
transparency as much as possible.

As Techdirt readers well know, one of the problems with measures
brought in for "exceptional situations" -- be it fighting terrorism or
tackling child pornography -- is that once in place, they have a habit
of being applied more generally. A case in point is the blocking of
Newzbin2 by BT in the UK. That was possible because BT had already
installed its "Cleanfeed" system to block child pornography: once in
place, this "specialized" censorship system could easily be deployed to block quite different sites.

As readers of this blog well know, copyright reform has been
desperately needed in this country for many years. The earlier Gowers
Review was almost totally ignored by the government that commissioned
it, and there was always the fear that the more recent Hargreaves Review
might suffer the same fate. Miraculously, that seems not to be the
case. Just before Christmas, the UK government published its response
to the consultation on copyright exceptions and clarifying copyright law
with details of how it intends to proceed (.pdf), and they are really pretty good.

Last week I wrote a potted history of the defeat of ACTA in
the last year. I mentioned that in the original talk, whose slides I
embedded in the article, I concluded by trying to draw some wider
lessons about fighting attacks on the Internet and broader freedoms.
Here's a summary of what I said.

Back in 2010, Techdirt reported on Turkey's habit of blocking Google
over certain holdings on its various sites. Mostly these were YouTube
videos it took exception to, but other services were banned too.
An earlier case, from 2009, received less attention at the time, but
has now led to a precedent-setting ruling from the European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR) that could have a big impact on future cases in
Europe, and maybe even beyond.

The European Commission has announced that it is withdrawing its referral of ACTA to
the European Court of Justice. If you had forgotten about that
particular detail, you're probably not alone: so much happened with ACTA in such a short space of time during the last year, that it's easy to lose track.

A little while back we wrote about Nathan Myhrvold's sniffy
comment that if you're not doing anything to help people suffering from
malaria, you have no right to criticize his patent troll operation,
Intellectual Ventures. As we also noted, this argument is rather
undermined by the fact that his research involves such deeply impractical solutions as "photonic fences" and using magnets to make mosquitoes explode.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson,
is something of an institution in the UK, famous for his blond mop of
hair and outrageous opinions. He's also been a journalist on and off
for two decades, and is close to Rupert Murdoch, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that he's penned a characteristically witty defense of British newspapers. They're currently under threat of having governmental regulation imposed upon them in the wake of the UK's Leveson Inquiry, written in response to years of journalists breaking the law in search of hot stories, as Johnson acknowledges:

Recently, we noted that copyright levies in Europe are looking more and more anachronistic for the high-tech world. It seems that Nigeria has not noticed this, since Afro-IP points out to us that the Copyright (Levy of Materials) Order 2012 has been approved there, which will bring them in for a very wide range of goods:

Mike wrote how both Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee were concerned
about the outcome of the WCIT talks currently taking place in Dubai.
Those aren't the only important voices being raised. Here, for example,
is the Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox browser and many other free software projects:

As Techdirt has reported over the last year, the Indian government is becoming increasingly keen
on using cheaper, generic versions of important drugs to treat
diseases, rather than paying Western-level prices its people can ill
afford. Intellectual Property Watch reports on another instance of the
Indian authorities easing the way for low-cost versions by striking down a patent granted to Roche for the treatment of Hepatitis C. As the article explains, it's notable for at least two reasons:

As I mentioned
back in October, the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been
considering the Draft Communications Data Bill, aka Snooper's Charter,
seemed to be doing a rather splendid job. It asked witnesses extremely
perceptive questions, and seemed unwilling simply to accept the UK
government's line that we needed these draconian powers because
"terrorism"...

Today, the European Parliament votes on the Unitary Patent. As I explained
yesterday, what is being presented is something of a botch, lashed up
at the last moment in a desperate attempt to push this through after
years of discussion. This is not the right way to pass good laws, and
certainly not acceptable for something that will have a dramatic effect
on business in Europe.

I've been writing about the attempt to craft a Unitary Patent in
Europe for some years. The idea in itself is not bad: a patent that is
valid across all of Europe. That would simplify filings and save costs,
both of which are to be welcomed. But the devil is in the details, and
it looks like those details are increasingly devilish.

A couple of months back, Mike wrote about how Psy's relaxed attitude to people infringing
on his copyright helped turn Gangnam Style into one of the most
successful cultural phenomena in recent years, and that includes
becoming the most-viewed video on YouTube ever

Ah yes, the maximalists will retort, this free-and-easy, laid-back
approach is all very nice, but it doesn't put food on his table, does
it? If you want to make a living from this stuff, you've got to enforce copyright to stop all those freeloaders ruining your business. Well, maybe not:

France's Hadopi graduated response approach, also known as "three
strikes", occupies a special place in the annals of copyright
enforcement. It pioneered the idea of punishing users accused of
sharing unauthorized copies of files, largely thanks to pressure from
the previous French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who seems to have hated
most aspects of this new-fangled Internet thing. Sadly, other
countries took up the idea, including the UK with its awful Digital
Economy Act, New Zealand, Spain and, more recently, the US.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.